How Blake Lively learned to tolerate the sharks, in and outside The Shallows
It’s girl versus shark in 28-year-old’s entertaining summer outing – a role inspired by husband Ryan Reynolds’ turn in Buried. And buried is what Lively’s done to criticism of her acting and sniping about her fortune
In a career that’s already seen her star in TV hit Gossip Girl and be directed by the likes of Ben Affleck, Oliver Stone and Rebecca Miller, Blake Lively may well mark 2016 as a red-letter year. If watching her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, triumph with the R-rated superhero movie Deadpool wasn’t enough, she’s just seen her new film with Woody Allen, the 1930s Hollywood glamour tale Café Society, open the Cannes Film Festival.
And now she’s flying – or should that be swimming? – solo, in one of the summer’s most entertaining thrillers, The Shallows.
An “isolation movie”, as the 28 year-old Lively dubs it, the film’s pitch is as simple as they come: girl versus shark. Lively plays Nancy Adams, a medical student who travels to a Mexico beach shortly after her mother dies to surf the same waves she did years before. Riding her board, she gets trapped just 200 metres from shore by that most forbidding of movie predators, a great white shark. What follows is a pure-blooded, no-frills battle for survival, in what’s been called “Jaws meets 127 Hours”.
While it’s the sort of film that’s right in the wheelhouse of The Shallows’ Spanish director, Jaume Collet-Serra – famed for action vehicles Non Stop, Unknown and Run All Night with Liam Neeson – it was Lively’s husband of four years who first inspired her to take the role. Reynolds’ phenomenal turn in 2010’s Buried was “one of the reasons why I wanted to do The Shallows,” she explains. “If you haven’t seen it, you have to see it.”
The gutsy tour-de-force thriller is certainly one of Reynolds’ finest hours. Playing a truck driver who wakes up to find he’s been entombed in a coffin below ground, Reynolds is literally the only actor on screen – all other characters are just voices he speaks to via a cell phone.
“They don’t cut out of the box once,” she says, lighting up at the thought of it. “It’s such great filmmaking and such great acting. And that was also an athletic event. He separated a shoulder shooting that. I don’t know how he could separate a shoulder in a coffin. He’s the only person able to do that! And he did, he managed it!”
